romantic than are events and situations in times remote or in

places strange.

It is distinctly true, as Walter Pater has said, that in the overcharged atmosphere of the middle ages there are many unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty, much that will satisfy our curiosity and our love of the beautiful, - hence the middle ages furnish ready-made the most usable material for illustration of romantic thought and feeling. But the same things exist in the twentieth century; only they are not so easy to isolate from their surroundings. Intensity of mood or strong interest in what has hitherto not been recognized, or not fully appreciated, is the spirit of romanticism, rather than interest in a far-away time or in an unfamiliar geographical location.

Nor is it a highly imaginative quality, in the sense of a lofty way of looking at things, that makes up the romantic atmosphere. Wordsworth is almost universally recognized as the "apostle " of the romantic movement in England, and yet he places the most conscious restraints upon imaginative flight in what he considers his best work, The Excursion. There is no exposition of romanticism that would not describe realism as well, if it should take as an illustration such lines as these from Wordsworth,

And I have traveled far as Hull to see

What clothes he might have left or other property.

Interest in things hitherto not sufficiently recognized, and treatment of them in such a way as to suggest that in them there are insoluble mysteries and strange and beautiful and wonderful powers of arousing curiosity, that is romantic. Remoteness from the hitherto unexperienced rather than remoteness in time and place or in either of them gives the romantic atmosphere.

Definition of Romanticism. - Romance might be very simply defined as that which represents the mysterious, or at least the marvelous, in either real or fancied life.

Robert Burns. —Now, this third period of English verse in the eighteenth century, which was also the easily marked beginning of the "romantic movement," opened with the work of one who, not less than any man who ever lived, practiced the maxim that "there is but one school, that of Nature," though he did not look to masters old or new for a key. That man was Robert Burns. Burns neglected any care or thought of what others had done, and for his inspiration went directly to the sources of experience, of thought, and of feeling.

This song-intoxicated "Ayreshire ploughman" published his first volume of poems in 1786. Elemental feeling, instinct, not classic masters, not intellect even, dominated this man. Here is his doctrine of the matter that had troubled all his predecessors since Dryden :

The Muse, nae poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel' he learned to wander,
Adown some trotting burn's meander,
And no think lang;

O sweet to stray, and pensive ponder
A heart-felt sang.

John G. Lockhart's Life of Burns and Thomas Carlyle's Essay on Burns are among the most read of biographical works. This is true not only because they are so well written, but because the subject treated in them is one of the most interesting. Burns, like Shakespeare, came from the ranks of the poor, though Shakespeare was of the town and Burns of the country. Burns suffered many hardships from his early poverty, and sympathized strongly with all weak and downtrodden creatures. He turned aside his plow to save the mouse nest and the

daisy, brooded over the pathos of the one and the beauty of the other, and then sang of them in his poems. He was much influenced by the contemporary wave of democracy then sweeping over the political and social world. Perhaps no man has ever desired more strongly the realization of many a poet's dream of the identification of the democracy and the aristocracy, the coming of all people upon one level, and that level the highest. Neither leisure, nor dress, nor authority, nor title, nor wealth makes a man, in Burns's opinion, but good sense and native worth. A man's a man if endowed with sense and character, and to Burns the time is coming when

man to man, the warld o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.

Burns was born in 1759 and died in 1796; but into those few years were crowded many hard and sad experiences, and, at times, many pleasing ones both among the socially great and the lowly, for he was welcomed in cultured Edinburgh as well as in the plowman's cottage.

Few can read his passionately earnest songs against oppression and in praise of loyalty and humanity without being moved to recognition of the greatness of Burns. Passionate treatment of love is the chief interest of Burns, however, and to him an easy task, for his singing robes were ever on; and perhaps fullness of blood rather than of brain accounts for the buoyant force and spontaneity of nearly all that he penned. The Jolly Beggars, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Tam o' Shanter, The Banks o' Doon, Afton Water, Highland Mary, To Mary in Heaven, Bannockburn, Comin' through the Rye, My Heart's in the Highlands, and For A' That and A' That, and numbers of other poems by him are known wherever English-speaking people read. William Blake. - The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Ex